Swapping single SSD to larger size

[ccvortex]

Need to image my current boot 1TB SSD so I can swap it out with a 4TB Samsung. I am assuming I can image the boot drive and then apply that image to a new drive but keeping the new drives physical size... any thoughts on which app is best for this?

[Aaron44126]

Tools I have used for this type of thing are Macrium Reflect and Acronis True Image.

These products both have an option to do a drive-to-drive clone, or also to create an image of the drive and then write that image back to a different drive.

There used to be a free version of Macrium Reflect which you can still find with a simple web search, but it is no longer available right on their site. It should still work fine.

 

If you have some comfort level with Linux, you can just boot a Linux "live" environment and do it from there. Look up using the "dd" command to clone a disk. You can also use "dd" to make a disk image and then write that image back to a different disk. This will leave you with the same partition layout that you currently have (1 TB volume size, with the "extra" 3 TB unallocated) which you can easily fix afterwards using GParted, a straight-forward GUI partition management tool for Linux which is also included in most "live" environments.

 

If your laptop only has room for one NVMe drive, you can get a cheap USB enclosure to attach the other drive to while doing the clone. That will allow you to do a drive-to-drive clone without having to find room on another drive somewhere for an image.

 

I wrote all of this and then realized that Samsung has their own clone tool as well. It is now integrated into Samsung Magician. ...I've never personally used this one before, but it should be "free" if you are migrating to a Samsung drive. https://semiconductor.samsung.com/consumer-storage/support/tools/